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…a goodly number of us dreamers are going to ruefully reflect that it was entirely possible for humanity to establish off-planet settlements following the Apollo program. Settlements that likely could have been self-sustaining by now because in the alternate reality where humankind put as much effort and resources and brains as possible behind establishing populations outside this fragile egg basket we call Earth, the early ones could have been in orbit and on the moon in the 1980s.

There could have been nearly 40 years to chase the kinks out of the recycling loops and life support and hydroponics. To build solar power plants all over the darn place up there and drag a water-ice comet into Earth orbit if we couldn’t find enough to fling up to orbital colonies from Luna with mass drivers.

40 years to send more and more people up and for people to start being born up there.

40 years to establish a reservoir of human beings and our technological knowledge out of range of Kim Jong-Un and Kim Jong-Trump (brothers of another ego-rage-spiritual mother) and their shoe-on-podium nuclear chest-beating.

It does, you know. Everything does explode. The sheer carnage one sees here, day and night, is amazing. Is amazing the right word? Yes and no. Amazing, horrific, awful and awe-inspiring in a sad and pathetic and scandalous and phantasmagorically grievous sort of way. It’s beyond words, really. But here we are in a medium of words. So.

Soldiers bearing the marks of frantically rushed training and gear bearing the marks of hasty 3D printing flood in daily, and daily the Hadesbots drag off as many, give or take a little, to bulldozed pits or even tumble them into a convenient natural ravine. Dead, destroyed, consumed by the appetite of the war.

The vultures are so sleek and fat I’m amazed they can still fly. That’s a good thing in a disgusting and depressing sort of way.

It makes the fake vultures easy to spot. The exploding drone vultures are normal looking, even a bit gaunt.

That ease of identification doesn’t stop the soldiers and defense bots (and all of the civilians, who, after all, are equally opposed to dying) from shooting down every vulture they can shoot. And any other bird they spy, for that matter. They’re all suspect.

Everyone, that is, but the smattering of American medics. They are strictly unarmed – not even a sidearm, not even a little one – by the terms of their surprisingly enduring cease-fire with China.

It’s an uneasy cease-fire, to be sure. But nobody wants an escalation, not even the nuclear powers or their allies who are the ones actually fighting this nakedly proxy war.

The Americans are nervous, yes. Yesterday one lost a chunk of his calf muscle to a butterfly.

A butterfly. Who expects a butterfly to explode?

Can you imagine the insanity of troops carrying state of the art smart assault rifles trying to shoot down the butterflies as they pass a field of wildflowers? Smart rifles are not made to target butterflies.

Can you imagine, then, how much ammunition a war on butterflies demands? A war on butterflies and every other threat, which is everything, because everything explodes? How many delivery drones to carry the ammunition to the soldiers who are not only engaged in killing their human and butterfly opponents, but also must kill every bird, rodent, cow, goat, chicken, snake, and insect they encounter?

If civilization ends in this war, lays fallow for ten thousand years, and is reborn, their scientists will believe an enormous asteroid made of metal struck here, because there are so many bullets scattered about after two years of this madness.

Bullets turn up in every tree passed, every latrine pit dug, every wall taken shelter behind. They glimmer in pockets all down every streambed, winking like clutches of gold nuggets. Nuggets that are stained with death. They trigger somber reflection at their discovery, not the excitement of a windfall.

The windfall we receive here is living through the day. Not only surviving the relentless drone fauna, but the snipers and the migratory landmines with their subtle borers and seismic imagers, and of surviving the threat of worse.

Every time there is a retreat of any sort, even of a single squad of soldiers, thoughts turn to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Are they clearing out so this place can be wiped smooth and radioactive?

A nuclear weapon could be aboard the great eagle I’m watching as I write this.

It’s circling a mountain peak, tracing the thermals through the sky in a crooked path that never quite retraces itself.

Eight of the nations embroiled here, directly or via proxy, are nuclear capable.

Three of those nations are known to have the capacity to custom-print nuclear warheads on only a few days’ advance notice.

Theoretically, a custom-printed subcritical nuclear bomb could fit aboard a false cow or sheep or horse. Even, perhaps, a goat or a dog.

Or one might just fit inside one of the numerous and enormous eagles that call these mountains home. It would have to spend most of its time gliding on thermals, though. Even the tiniest nuke would be heavy, and a drone eagle would have to flap unrealistically quickly and hard to gain altitude without the help of the warm air rising off the sun-warmed mountains.

As quickly as new troops are slaughtered – and they’ve grown noticeably younger and older as the demand for soldiers outstrips the human speed of reproduction – the survivors go dead-eyed and silent at the realization that there is no competence or heroics that can guard against a nuclear attack, even if one can imagine defending themself against deadly butterflies and unseen snipers.

The only defenses are to resign oneself to the inevitability of death, or to go mad.

Some do the latter. Very few of those are so obvious or dangerous to themselves and others as the movies would have you believe. It manifests, instead, in ways that choke off the humanity inside, as too-hard earth chokes off a sapling and leaves it withered.

More than any war in history, death and fear saturate the environment.

A week or two agao, a tree branch killed two men. In the shrapnel they found the joints of little robotic legs, like the legs of a centipede but made of kevlar and carbon fiber. The walking tree branch drone, a robot built around an explosive core sheathed in a titanium sleeve grooved to shatter into a thousand flying nails, had climbed into the tree and settled down to wait for a target to pass.

Nobody knows how long it waited. It could have waited mere hours, or waited two years. Subtle solar panels smaller than the scales of a trout powered it.

Is there one, or are there several perhaps, in the glarled tree beside the latrine pit I visit here in camp every day?

Has an exploding rat crept beneath my cot while I was at the latrine? Is it waiting for me to finish this bit of writing and lie down to sleep, unexpectedly forever?

Will a deadly butterfly find a gap in the mosquito netting in the morning and end me while I brush my teeth?

I’ll have to leave this place soon. I can feel myself slipping away under the constant fear that even invades my dreams.

It is worth remembering that the soldiers, those who live, lack the luxury of leaving when they feel themselves slipping slowly into madness.

I won’t survive much longer here.

Then again, nothing does.

END

*The fourth of May is only a publication date. Per my agreement with the Indian Army, I an say only that the situations I describe occurred within the past one hundred days. Details may be altered to protect individuals or operational security. The post above was required to clear Indian Army intelligence before publication. This disclaimer is required to appear here, and I am required to abide by its terms and additional terms as required by standing military orders and the orders of officers of the Army.

(This post appeared on my Patreon page on the 18th of this month — my patrons see posts 3 days early. When I publish a new ebook, they get a FREE copy THIRTY DAYS EARLY even if I charge for it everywhere else! Even a pledge of a single buck per month gets you those benefits — and you also get the pleasure of supporting a financially struggling self-published author whose wife, 3 kids, and self insist on extravagant luxuries like “food” and “electricity” and even — GASP WHAT FRIPPERY — a 20 year old minivan. We’re such softies.)

So, I’ve gotten in the habit of posting a substantial companion ramble/rant/essay/callitwhatyouwill with these 13 word stories. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I propped my chest up on my zafu (stiff meditation cushion, usually for butts & not writing in bed, for anyone who hasn’t run into that word before), nudged myself over perilously close to my restlessly sleeping 2 year old boy where the dim light of the nightlight was brightest, and proceeded to write about 700 words longhand. I’m sure that was wonderful for my eyes, probably aged them an extra year and I’m already in progressive-lens trifocals. Sign me up for a writers’ purple heart, I suppose.

After a bit of editing, as my edits usually go, the companion post ended up expanding to 805 words. Plus all these words I’m typing here. I’m a glutton for composition.

Without further ado, here’s the post:

We talk and think a lot about the end of the world. For my and my parents and grandparents’ generation (once that last passed through the Great Depression and World War II) the vision of the end of the world is tied up in Cold War visions of nuclear holocaust. I don’t know about you, but this Gen Xer has a copy of The Day After on DVD – the movie, which I saw in its original airing on television when I was 13 — was a distillation of all of the vague fears of death at the hands of Soviet ICBMs that occasionally haunted my nightmares and daymares. I’m sure I’m not the only one with those experiences.

Today that nuclear war specter is still around, a shade still fearful but overshadowed by younger, more vital terrors, banished to the edge of consciousness. We’ve become comfortable with our eternal wars waged against small nations lacking nuclear arms, and even with current events in the Middle East and the South China Sea and Crimea, few even bother to wonder if a third world war might be in the making, or to fear the potential for a mass detonation of thermonuclear weapons.

Pollution as a human-world-ender, too, has lost some of its former luster. Russia has survived the worst of messy Soviet industrialism and Chernobyl as well – few pay attention to what aftermath there might be. The same for Japan and its Fukushima, China’s current smogs and rare-earth-mine pollutant pits, the Flint, Michigans and flaming fracking faucets of the United States, the landlocked oil spills and leaky pipelines the petroleum multinationals have splotched major portions of several nations in Africa with. Even the once-vivid fears of bioengineered, weaponized anthrax and smallpox have faded.

These confidences that the old dangers no longer threaten hold their own danger – that if a danger does arise from those quarters, we’ll find it easy to overlook until it’s too late.

Today, we sublimate all those fears, along with our fear of civil unrest and mob rule, into zombie fiction, as far as I can tell. A nice, safe end of the world, one unrealistic enough yet barely plausible enough to allow suspension of disbelief and provide a nice, safe thrill, like a rollercoaster with a secure safety caged seat.

But unlike we older folks (though many of us are catching on) the Millennials and – have we decided on a name for those following them yet? The Trans-Millennials being born now, like my littlest sons – have a world-ending specter as vivid and potent as any child of the Cold War ever had: climate change.

It’s easy for some of us olders (and a few youngers too) to downplay or ignore climate change – though I’m given to understand that the United States is among those nations of the world in which the sport of ignoring scientific consensus is most popular. Some even like to chalk up the very concepts of climate change and global warming and rising carbon dioxide levels to a shadowy cabal of academics thirsty to line their pockets with grant money. As if that were actually lucrative – a local district manager for a snack food distributor stands to better that “fortune” by exceeding sales quotas. Some even go farther and more wildly afield into theories about Illuminati – but we’ve pretty much always had those. Before the internet the Illuminati or similar “explained” Cold War threats as the fruits of conspiracy as well. Those theorists and their imaginings come and go like the dew, appearing to explain what’s “really behind” each new dawn.

But climate change, like nuclear weapons, will not be going away. And nuclear war, except in its most extreme Cold War incarnations, is not a threat on the same enduring and growing levels.

If climate change is the existential threat the Millennials will grow up with – and it is – so will their great-grandchildren and those great-grandchildrens’ great-grandchildrens’ great-grandchildren.

Climate change may or may not develop into a truly existential threat in itself. But if it heads into Venus-greenhouse territory, or even becomes enough to shift the wheat belts to the poles and drive the subtropical and tropical rice bowls into trans-tropical heat and weather pattern, whatever those might be, the worldwide struggle to adapt and survive may well add nuclear war and disregard for pollution in favor of short-term industrial advantage and wars fought with engineered plagues.

And if the end of humanity does come at the hands of a climate-change driven complex of disaster, by simple extinction or reduction to the stone age or pre-intelligence as a species, perhaps in time another species will evolve to occupy the intelligent builder niche we humans failed to hold. Squirrels are as good a candidate as any – I welcome Earth’s new squirrel overlords, assuming we do screw things up badly enough.

Somehow, they restrained themselves until their children traveled among the stars.

Then: self-destruction.

————-

I remember the Cold War, going to school in a designated nuclear shelter, the uneasy jokes about getting nuked, Reagan joking about nuking the Russians, ha-ha, ho-ho, we’re all going to die so let’s yuk it up black humor style.

But somehow we managed not to unleash the nasty nuke genie. And we still manage today. After seeing the horrors two bombs wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’ve managed to resist the temptation and continue to kill each other by less wholesale means, keep the torture and shooting and dronestriking down to a dull subnuclear roar.

When the day comes (I say when and not if out of hope that we’ll actually manage it, we self-sabotaging humans) that humanity has significant settlements off earth, I wonder if the gloves will come off. Once there are a million people on Mars, or in asteroid habitats, or on the far side of Luna, or on a planet around another star (should be be lucky enough to stumble into some sci-fi method of faster than light travel), will it sink in, that nuking each other now will not doom the human race?

Will that be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, that allows some politician to finally reason, hey, letting the nukes out isn’t such a big deal, even if we wipe life off the planet our descendants will live on, humanity will survive?

It’s a dark cold night, and my imagination is playing nasty games with me. I hope when you read this it’s sunny, and I’m wrong.